Libertine

...especially the ones that will automatically disable trades if weird stuff happens... do their makers realize how easy scripts like that make it for people to shut down tgps using those scripts??

Anyone can just add his own site as a trade, and then just start shutting down the other trades one by one, thus getting all the traffic of the tgp with the "automatic" tradescript.

With a bit of good timing and the tgp owner on your icq list you can easily get a good 8 hours of traffic out of it.

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Libertine

(and yes, with the right bot disabling all other trades is a matter of minutes)

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Juicy D. Links

You put your autosignup trades on disable till you enable and approve em it wont be a problem

Libertine

Yes it will. If the other guy has a tgp, and a bit of patience, you're screwed. And obviously, he doesn't have to disable ALL other trades... he can just disable half or three quarters (to avoid suspicion).

Besides that, someone who doesn't like you can very easily fuck up your traffic just for the hell of it.

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Juicy D. Links

Not really , disable new trades to send zero back till you approve the trade.

Libertine

Yes, and, like I said, if he has a bit of patience (until you approve the trade that is) you're screwed if he decides to take your traffic. And if he isn't completely stupid, he can also avoid all suspicion.


But that's just an example of what can be done.

Someone who simply doesn't like you can completely destroy your traffic overnight, by disabling your 10 or 15 biggest trades.

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Juicy D. Links

How can he take your traffic when the trade is set at zero return?

Libertine

Because he WAITS UNTIL YOU APPROVE THE TRADE.
Unless you don't take new trades, chances of that happening eventually are rather large.

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Juicy D. Links

Oh ok ,

Easy solution then dont trade with anyone you dont know

Libertine

And then the only danger is that someone who doesn't like you disables your 10 biggest trades while you are sleeping.

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Libertine

It surprises me how few people care that anyone with a simple working hitbot and a single proxy can fuck up their sites

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rowan

What can you do? Referers are not an accurate method of authentication. You would need some sort of secret system to generate unique keys between trades to solve this problem. With so many trade scripts around there will probably never be such a standard.

Something along similar lines... for several hours I had a single IP doing HEAD requests every few seconds with the referer URL being one of my trades. I have little doubt it was someone deliberately trying to fuck up his site - the trading scripts either auto disable him for a bad raw:unique ratio, or if they count prod on raws then his productivity falls so much that the trade hardly returns anything to him.

Libertine

What you can do?
Easy... do not disable the trade, but block the IP that is acting weird, and just log what happened so the TGP owner can decide for himself what he will do with the situation. Prevent the possible cheating from affecting your TGP, but do not overreact.

A single thing you know for sure is that if you can easily detect something as cheating, chances are that someone is doing it deliberately to fuck shit up.
Putting the decision of whether someone is cheating or not in the hands of any of the trade scripts out there at present does not work... most simply aren't advanced enough for that.

Scripts that auto-disable trades all by themselves are too easy to manipulate. Do you really want every scriptkiddie out there to have the ability to bring your site to a complete halt within a matter of minutes?

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rowan

Block a single IP? How does that stop people using multiple proxies? Also, some cheats may be decided on aggregate statistics, such as a high percentage of proxy traffic or a bad raw:uniq ratio.

Libertine

Blocking ips (or actually just not registering their hits anymore) is what you do when single ips are responsible for too many hits or clicks. Works a lot better than disabling the trade, I'd say.

Too high a percentage of proxy traffic? Block all proxy traffic from that trade, but still register the non-proxy traffic. Works a lot better than disabling the trade, again.

Bad raw:unique ratio? That's in most cases caused by a limited number of ips that hit a site insane amounts of times. So, you just stop registering the offending ips. (that is apart from the fact that you should ignore raws and trade by uniques anyway) Once again, better than disabling the trade.

Automatically disabling trades is like automatically blowing up a shop if too many shoplifters come there. Crude, destructive and not nearly as effective as simply implementing more subtle security.


And, the most important part is that a single person won't be able to completely and utterly fuck up your traffic in a matter of minutes with very little effort.

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